Mostly just for enjoyment - most of the rereads are a combination - things I loved as a kid and want to share with him as he's ready for it. He loved "Odd and the Frost Giants" and wants to learn more about Norse mythology now, which I think is pretty awesome.
The new stuff tends to skew a little older and is just for me - some of it is pretty borderline. I suspect in a more conservative community, some of what our local library shelves as YA would be in adult sci-fi/fantasy. Likewise, some of the McKinley and Marriller I have listed are actually shelved YA, but I don't personally think of them that way.
The Lemony Snickett is...okay. I started reading the series when it first came out and lost steam after the first 4 books. It is classic early YA in that the plots are highly repetitive, the villain is always the same, etc and after a while I just got bored and didn't go back to it when the next book came out. A couple of years ago I had a bunch of accumulated bookmooch points and slowly mooched the rest of the series and decided it would be fun to just plow through them this fall (it was definitely nice light reading when I had the flu in October). I doubt I'll ever read them again, except with the kids, but they are fun little reads and worth either getting from your local library or from a swap site. I don't know that I'd spend $13 a book (since the commercial releases are all hardcover), though it looks like you can get the whole 13 book set for less than $100 through Amazon. If you do decide to try to mooch them, a lot might be softcover, because Scholastic book clubs did softcover releases, so I have a mix (to the extent that consistent formats are important).
The new stuff tends to skew a little older and is just for me - some of it is pretty borderline. I suspect in a more conservative community, some of what our local library shelves as YA would be in adult sci-fi/fantasy. Likewise, some of the McKinley and Marriller I have listed are actually shelved YA, but I don't personally think of them that way.
The Lemony Snickett is...okay. I started reading the series when it first came out and lost steam after the first 4 books. It is classic early YA in that the plots are highly repetitive, the villain is always the same, etc and after a while I just got bored and didn't go back to it when the next book came out. A couple of years ago I had a bunch of accumulated bookmooch points and slowly mooched the rest of the series and decided it would be fun to just plow through them this fall (it was definitely nice light reading when I had the flu in October). I doubt I'll ever read them again, except with the kids, but they are fun little reads and worth either getting from your local library or from a swap site. I don't know that I'd spend $13 a book (since the commercial releases are all hardcover), though it looks like you can get the whole 13 book set for less than $100 through Amazon. If you do decide to try to mooch them, a lot might be softcover, because Scholastic book clubs did softcover releases, so I have a mix (to the extent that consistent formats are important).
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